Ancestral Wisdom

This article presents the proposition that largely unexplored folktales of the Arabian Peninsula are essential to interrogating indigenous models of social justice and human rights. The study attempts to recover “ancestral wisdom” through culturally specific narrative traditions to critique globalized Western discourses. This study employs qualitative critical content analysis of the compiled folktales and apply Anastasiia Andreevna Osmushina’s framework to study how narrative models based on justice, i.e., retributive, restorative, distributive, procedural, and divine, are configured across demographic, economic, political, and religious contexts. The analysis indicates a well-developed narrative jurisprudence around the rights of the marginalized and a critique of supremacy power toward a sociopolitical picture of rights and duties intertwined under a divine cosmic guarantee of equity. The tales cannot be considered mere apocryphal relics but turn out to be very much alive as pedagogical tools that create critical consciousness and social agency similar to those processes observed by Hajisoteriou et al. and Senehi et al.. This study demonstrates that Arabian folktales provide a decolonial lens of understanding justice, and thus enrich plural understandings of justice, while seeking to assert the importance of subaltern voices in the global ongoing dialogue for human dignity and social equity.